


No-Name Island

by SylvanWitch



Category: Spartacus: Vengeance
Genre: AU, Comment Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-25
Updated: 2012-05-25
Packaged: 2017-11-06 00:45:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Comment fic written for the prompt:  Agron/Nasir, 1600s pirates, <i>But why is the rum gone?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	No-Name Island

**Author's Note:**

> Written for LJ comm. Spartacus2010's Other Roads AU Spartacus Ficathon for a prompt by staringiscaring.

The island has no name. It rises like the mossy hump of a great whale out of the blue, blue ocean, the jungle shaggy green right down to the water, except for a fine golden strand kissed by gentle white combers.

To the uninitiated, it seems impossible that there’s breathing room for a single human being, let alone a community.

This is one thing the buccaneers count on.

The other, of course, is the fatal breakers hashing the water to raging spume in a half-moon around their gentle bay. Only an experienced sailor could bring a boat through the narrow, fast channel between obliterating reefs. 

The men who live on the unnamed island are experienced sailors, to a man.

Some of them are deserters from His Majesty’s Fucking Navy, some whalers who got tired of the lonely life and the uptight captains. A few are prisoners who escaped essential slavery in Hispaniola. Many were woodcutters put out of work after the last imperial shake-up.

Nobody cared where anyone had come from, and most made a point of not asking. The island was rich with fruit, the fishing in against the reef on the bayside was lush, and there were feral pigs aplenty for slaughtering and roasting until the meat fairly fell from the bones.

Nasir had been a ship’s boy who’d escaped a tyrannous captain about whom he’d refused to speak. Agron had traced the ugly scars on Nasir’s back, buttocks, and thighs with a hand trembling in equal parts regret and rage. He knew what the boy must have survived before he’d found a way to free himself.

Only once had Agron said as much to Nasir, who had said only, “What makes you think I was aiming for an island?”

The flat look in the boy’s eyes had made Agron shiver, and he’d gathered Nasir into his arms as much for his own comfort as to express their solidarity.

They were together now and had been for a long while, the traditional marriage celebrated with rum liberated from a merchantman caught a-lee and carried onto the reef. Her bones made good wood for their fires, and the pig had been the largest any had seen.

Agron had hunted the beast with his own long spear, the shaft fashioned from a driftwood spar, the blade the truncated prize sword of a Royal Navy captain. Agron never explained where he’d gotten it. When he wasn’t within earshot, old hands would tell newcomers that Agron had led a pirate’s crew against a forty-four gun frigate off the coast of Sao Paolo. 

No one but Nasir knew the sword had been Agron’s own.

They were celebrating their renewal this night, for they had chosen to remain together after their last raid, and it was the way of the people of the island. For his part, Agron needed no public promise; he knew he would ever and only belong to one man. 

That man was stretched out beside him in the sand, hands behind his head, eyes on the stars, which were spread like a net aglow with phosphorescence. They’d removed from the fire in a shower of bawdy jests and catcalls, wanting privacy and quiet. There wasn’t much of either even here—the island wasn’t that large, and much of it was vertical—but they’d grown up in close quarters and knew, as all sailors did, how to pretend to privacy.

It might have been the mostly empty bottle of rum, or perhaps it was the way that Nasir’s eyes shimmered in the starlight as he turned his head to look at Agron, but Agron found himself saying, “Will this be our last marriage?”

“To one another?” Nasir asked, wicked grin curling his lips upward, eyes flashing merriment visible even in dimness. But Agron did not return the smile, and he watched the laughter fade from his lover’s face, watched as Nasir closed himself away behind a veil of indifference such as he usually wore for the others who shared their island.

Agron was adrift; he couldn’t make a reckoning of what direction they might go. He only knew that Nasir had promised himself for another year, had made that much, at any rate, of a contract. It should be enough. 

“Can’t you say, Nasir? Can’t you promise me forever?”

Nasir’s snort was ugly. “There’s none who can do that,” he replied, turning his eyes back to the sky.

“Then whatever is left of our lives,” Agron answered shortly, suddenly angrier than he’d been in a long, long time. “I want to spend it with you. Do you not feel the same of me?”

For a breathless span of moments only the ocean answered them, a steady susurrus like the gentle breath of a sleeping leviathan.

Then, so quietly that Agron had to strain to hear him, “It is because I feel for you that I will not make such a promise.”

Undone by the despair in Nasir’s voice, Agron propped himself up on his elbow so that he could look into his lover’s face. He read there every betrayal of trust his lover had suffered, every moment of self-doubt beaten into him by brutal hands. He knew that Nasir felt himself ugly, unlovable, knew that he’d never ask Agron for anything lest in refusing Agron proved himself just another who would use and break or discard Nasir when he no longer had any value.

“You think I don’t know what you are?” Agron’s tone was careful, neutral, and finally Nasir turned his head to look up into Agron’s face.

Agron hoped Nasir saw there all the weight of age and years, all the terrible things he’d seen and done, every single experience that had brought Agron here to this beach on this unnamed island under a sky of watchful stars with him, the man he loved above any other.

With a shaking hand, Agron traced the fine line of Nasir’s cheek, down the sleek plunge of his nose and over the plush soft rise of his lips. He leaned in slowly, telegraphing his intention, but even as Nasir leaned up to welcome the kiss, Agron stilled, hovering just above the heat of Nasir’s mouth, feeling his breath wash over him spicy and sweet, rum and pineapple and the salt of the sea. Into his lover’s breath, he spoke words he’d never said, words he’d thought in the secret of his heart and intended never to let out, lest he tempt the universe, which was always unpredictable and often unkind.

When he finished speaking, he sealed his promise—his real promised, witnessed by the only other who needed to hear it—with a kiss, almost chaste, just a long, slow press of lips to lips and then the shared breath of pulling away.

On each of Nasir’s cheeks there was a silver thread of starlight, the tracks of his tears—joyful, if Agron could read his lover’s face, and he could. Oh, he could.

“We must consecrate this promise,” Nasir said a moment later, voice high and shaking but happy.

“There is no more rum,” Agron grieved, staring ruefully at the bottle, which he’d drained for the courage it would lend him.

“Then it is good that rum is not what I most want for this ritual,” Nasir answered, eyes coming alive with a decidedly unspiritual passion.

As Agron bore him down into the sand, Nasir sighed against the skin of his neck, raising goosebumps and making him shiver, and repeated back to Agron the same vows he had just spoken.

From along the strand came the sounds of merriment, raucous laughter and ribald jokes, but all Agron heard for some time thereafter was Nasir’s soft voice breaking his name again and again like waves against the beach.


End file.
